Monday, May 29, 2006

First came the egg, they say



May I giggle a little? There now seems to be a scientific verdict on the age old question of what came first. The favors go to the egg.

It takes some reasoning, but in brief I understand it is as follows. Genetic material does not change during an animal's life. Therefore the first bird that evolved into what we would call a chicken, probably in prehistoric times, must have first existed as an embryo inside an egg (CNN Science, 29th May 2006).

In my view this reasoning comes very close to yet another version of creationism. It is alright to be filosofical about the chicken and the egg and maintain strong convictions about the prevailence of one or the other, as long as you stay away from claiming either proposition as the truth. Of all questions, the matter concerning the chicken and the egg is destined to be eternal. It is part of our humanity that we never claim the answer.

So it was a mistake to throw science into it altogether. And to come out with an answer like this is a blasphemy. Only in theory there is some bird we could call ‘the first chicken’, as only in theory we could contemplate the first human. Every first chicken will first have to be constructed out of the genetic material provided by the parent birds. They can’t simply not have been chickens as they probably were not any other bird either – or any bird we know.
At another level, the answer science has so painstaikingly found is obviously correct – of course. You don’t need science for that. Whatever chicken came out first, it could only have come from an egg. Everybody knows that.

So, it is not the answer that makes the subject so endlessly interesting. Why would anything so obvious even raise an eyebrow? Our scienctists in fact made pretty fools of themselves both by claiming the answer and by taking hold of the question. They shouldn’t have. They should have left the issue where it belongs: in the realm of filosofy, in that space of our mind where we can still entertain our fantasies, our power of imagination beyond the obvious.

That is what makes the chicken so important. The true question is about the origin and meaning of life. Therefore, in the name of our humanity, we should hold it eternally possible that the chicken came first as much as the egg.

Thursday, May 18, 2006

The Da Vinci Fraud


One of the most astonishing facts in the entire sequence following the publication of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, is the apparent conviction of the author himself that he has written a book of history rather than a book of fiction.

I read it two summers ago. It thoroughly satisfied me as an entertaining story on the beachfront, but nothing else. To any intelligent reader it is an obvious, well concocted assembly of totally fictitious events. Nothing in the book even remotely reflects anything historic, and to claim otherwise in my view can only be born out of a childish desire to believe in shere fairytales. After I finished the book, I didn’t give it a single further thought.

But then the book became a hype. I was flabbergasted. Who on earth would even contemplate to take Dan Brown’s fiction serious? Well, almost everybody.

We live in strange times. It is an ultimate madness. Why, even Discovery Channel and National Geographic spend their precious resources on the subject. Admittedly, their documentaries on the book largely declassify Dan Brown’s assertions. Still, in giving his book such sizeable attention, they at least leave us with the impression that The Da Vinci Code is serious enough for such documentaries to start with. Moreover, even when people like Tony Robinson clearly reject Dan Brown from A to Z, most individuals shown on both Discovery and NGC are allowed to brabble their nonsensical fantasies. They pollute the public’s mind with highly unfounded allusions about the history of Christendom that are fully and truly outrageous.

Why care?

Essentially I do not care about the fraud itself. But what disturbs me, is the apparent preference of many people in our present world to consume fiction as a substitute to fact. It worries me that such fiction but also the arguments which accompany it override the experience of reality so massively. It worries me that responsible TV-channels interview people like Dan Brown as an informant rather than in their true capacity of storymaker.

It is in particular in our Information and Communication Age that this tendency should cause substantial concern among people of reason and intellect, people who would like to see our world progress on the basis of our critical abilities and not on the basis of primitive emotions and stupidity.

Enough is said. Go and enjoy The Da Vinci Code. It is a good story. Go see the movie, as I will. And then forget it, as I most certainly will too.
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Post Scriptum:
So I saw the movie. Don't blame me. It was enjoyable to see it together with a good friend. How did Tom Hanks and Sir Ian McKellen get involved in this? Anyway, it is difficult to say I disliked the movie because I read the book, or despite the fact that I did. Either way, anyone who still believes the story is about a serious subject, should by now know better. However entertaining as a book, on the screen The Da Vinci Code entirely dissembles in front of your eyes as a mediocre, superficial and stupendous tale of Agatha Christie amateurs who stumble their way through one clue after the other, each time missing the one outstanding truth: somebody got killed and we all know who did it.

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

The Devil should be Yummie!


Image of the Devil born out of superstition and the desire to punish people instead of helping them

One of the greatest mistakes of Christianity is to depict the Devil as a fierce and ugly entity, with flames coming out of his mouth and horns growing out of his skull and eyes that set you on fire the minute you look at ‘it’ .

A I see it, most of the evil things that the Church warns against are pure seductions. How come the Devil is ugly, but the evil things we crave for are so desirable? Moreover, why should the Church give out a warning against something disgusting to start with. Why bother?

The prime function of the Church is to propagate love and goodness, and selfless behaviour. And even if this is not a convincing advice for everybody, the Church theorems find support in classic and modern day economic theories which state that acting in the interest of all, also serves the interest of self. There is a multitude of paths to goodness.

And indeed, it is important for the Church – or any institution of morality – to help unmask everything that distracts us from our power of love and goodness in the societies in which we live. Today, this is an especially monumental task given the many distractions that surround us. It is very difficult to be good, or to love and be selfless, when we are seduced with such intensity by all the goodies and yummies that are piled up in our stores, on our TV-screens, around every corner, every minute of our daily life.

And deep down in our hearts we know that to fully succumb to materialism and to a role of mere slaves to the dictates of consumerism, we add little value to our own humanity, let alone to the humanity of those surrounding us.

So, really, it is not the Devil whom the churches and moral leaders should raise their hands against. The Devil is a mere relic of ancient superstition. It is a non-existing, highly unattractive concept of a world that was out to punish people, not to support them. In our world we should disregard this concept althogether as ridiculous and born out of ignorance.

Evil does exist, of course, and it follows every footstep of those who submit themselves to the mere satisfaction of their own desire, who see the world simply from their own viewpoint, without empathy for any one else. Such evil is all around us; it is in us, whenever we demand, rather than offer, whenever we want, rather than wish to give, it is around us whenever we take beyond our real needs.

I am not a Church man per se. Nor do I see the world, or its potential, through the windows of religion. But I do see an important function of religious people, religious leaders, such as the Bishop of Rome, because they are dealing with the essence of our humanity and with the prerequisites of its surivival.

What I am saying here, is that current and future Bishops of Rome would greatly enhance the power of their function, if they abandon ancient superstitions and concepts. I, for one, would be impressed by any bishop who recognizes that whatever evil we should fight against, is not ugly or filled with burning flames. The evil in our humanity is filled with beauty, it is most seductive; we crave for it, we want to eat it, we want to be its image, it is our own dream of youth and beauty; it is the urge to sacrifice everything that stands in the way of our greatest satisfactions. The Devil, in fact, is all Yummie!

Wednesday, May 03, 2006

Einstein, Speer, McNamara & the fog of guilt



One might say that these names constitute an unlikely trio. They do. Yet, in key events of the Twentieth Century they reflect a common theme, each of them from a very different perspective – and each with a very different influence in his own lifetime.


It so happened that I had completed downloading The Fog of War (2004) from the internet, and decided to play it. From behind my desk it was almost like a two hour conversation between Robert McNamara, well known for his time as US Defence minister at the height of the Vietnam War, and me. But he was talking to an invisible interviewer, very intensively and with very little if any effort to conceal his emotions when touching apparently sensitive memories. McNamara served the Presidents JF Kennedy and LB Johnson, or – as one perhaps should say – he served Kennedy first of all and continued to serve Johnson until by the end of 1967 his position became untenible in the severe loyalty struggle that ensued in the last part of Johnson’s presidency. Soon after, McNamara became President of the World Bank and thus continued, almost without a scratch, his commendable career into the early eighties.


Next, the 3-part miniseries was televised about Nazi-architect and Armament minister Albert Speer and his relation with Adolf Hitler. Speer was one of the few of the NAZI-regime to be saved from hanging, getting a 20 year prison sentence instead, most of which he spent writing his Spandauer Diaries and ultimately his memoirs, without ever again talking to the remaining Hitler cronies. He was a free man in his last fifteen years until his death in 1981. To this day it remains somewhat of an enigma whether Speer was in fact a cunning opportunist or a true, be it naïve genius who simply got caught on the wrong side of the fence and didn’t know how to get out of it without jeopardizing his life or that of his family. His memoirs drew a large public as they provided the only credible first hand account of the inner workings of Hitler’s kllingmachine, admittedly without Speer himself being an immediate accomplice of its most horrid undertakings. But they never fully answered the question – nor did Speer himself in any of his further public utterances – whether or not he carried at least some of the blame for the prolonged agony and death of so many people, including Germans, unprecedented at any time in History.


Albert Einstein of course is the odd man out compared with McNamara and Speer, as he was a remarkable man in his own right and not a technocrat serving some one else, let alone living the life of a loyalist to dubious causes as can be said of the other two. Yet he too had helped to open a Box of Pandora, and singlehandedly he had let the world eat the forbidden fruit of Physics which ultimately led to the advent of the Atomic age and the Era of Nuclear Deterrence.

Thus it struck me that these three men represent – what I would call – the Dark Side of the Twentieth Century, largely without any of them wishing to have part in it, yet all three of them being highly instrumental in enabling the darkest side of humanity to do its devastating work. There is no doubt that these three men have struggled with this fact in their own conscience, as McNamara – who is the only one still living – apparently continues to do to this day. And there are of course, many differences. Einstein never, even remotely, actively participated in the planning and construction of the Atom Bomb. He saw it coming, and as he did, he tried to stop it.

Speer but also McNamara did participate in the organisation of evil, as McNamara readily admits in his account of the dilemma’s that – in particular – the people of the Johnson administration faced when they couldn’t just turn their back on Vietnam. They were the prisoner of the perceptions of their time, as ‘The Fog of War’ so clearly demonstrates, probably in a similar manner that Speer’s vision was fogged by the misleading appearances of the Hitler era (in particular in its first stages) – and in many ways, both men were left with an emerging hindsight that they had grossly misinterpreted the realities of their time, and that they would have to come to terms with this (if only in their own troubled minds) if ever their souls were to find peace in the afterlife. Einstein struggled with a similar sense of responsibility, and who can say what peace his soul has found in the mean time.

McNamara presented a number of Lessons as he emerged out of his own fog. There is an obvious merit to these lessons. Not only to they serve us to better understand the complex dynamics of good and evil in the larger part of the Twentieth Century. Most certainly they can help us to better understand the fog prevailing in our own era. But we should never loose out of sight (however troubling this may be especially in a fog), that this phenomenon works both ways. We can’t simply say: the fog is with our enemy, and not with us. Empathize with your enemy! – one of McNamara’s lessons. We cannot simply say: our world is good, and any world that threatens us is evil. The dilemma’s in our own time are obvious, and the outcome of our endeavours are far from clear.

Perhaps we need that other great achievement of the human mind, of which Einstein is its greatest icon, to prevail in our own perceptions of time, of good and evil, and right and wrong, before we can actually clear the fog that is permeating our lives today. The true understanding of Relativity. It is how we move, where we go, or where we stand at any given point, that perhaps can give us a clue, a slight hint, a minute insight into how we can achieve peace for our own souls once we reach that threshold ourselves.